


like a rusty knife

by canticle



Category: Persona 5
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, maladaptive akira, outside perspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-08 18:55:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16434962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canticle/pseuds/canticle
Summary: Everyone who knew Kurusu Akira before his parents transferred him out of town for the year agrees that he’s changed.





	like a rusty knife

**Author's Note:**

> this was written as part of a 200-follower celebration earlier this year, and it's finally gotten enough notes that i decided it deserved a home on the archive as well

Everyone who knew Kurusu Akira before his parents transferred him out of town for the year agrees that he’s changed.

He was a charismatic child, a dreamer and a dancer, an ace on their tiny gymnastics team, a drama enthusiast in the school plays. No one would have thought he’d be the sort of person to assault someone; no one would have recognized him when he returned if he hadn’t had the same name.

He doesn’t look any different, except for the way he does; the Kurusu that left, all his teachers agree, moved light on his feet, faster than he should, a recipient of banged elbows and skinned knees from the time he could walk. The Kurusu that comes back…slinks. He places every foot with deliberation, with almost unnatural grace, his eyes cataloguing everything that moves behind a mask as still as stone. “A resting bitch face,” Nakayama-san might be heard to mutter, “that Kashiwagi should learn to emulate.”

He might look the same, but his demeanor has changed completely. There’s no sign of the cheerful boy that left them before the end of their first year; the one that comes back for the start of the third might as well just be wearing his face. He’s silent verging on sullen; his attention is perpetually fixed on the window instead of the chalkboard. He has a  _cat_. The cat sits in his school bag and watches everything with unnaturally attentive eyes, and no one can figure out how to bring it up to him so that he leaves it at home instead.

The students are unnerved. The faculty are unnerved. The only one who isn’t unnerved is Kurusu himself, who parts the students in the halls like a knife wherever he goes, leaving whispers in his wake.

Rumor has it, and time proves it, that he spends every lunch on the roof, tucked over in the furthest corner rain or snow or shine. He’s always on his phone— no one ever is brave enough to eavesdrop, but a pair of eagle-eyed second years peek around the corner with a pair of binoculars and report back that, whoever he’s talking to and whatever it’s about, he’s  _smiling_. It’s downright creepy to watch his face transform from that expressionless mask to something mobile and animated; sometimes his teachers catch flashes of it on his face when he looks down at his phone during lessons.

There’s another thing; no matter how little attention he pays during class, if you ask Kurusu a question he’ll always know the answer. That’s the only thing he’ll say, and he’ll only participate if you forcefully call him out. His grades are top-notch— top of the class, in fact, to the dismay and rabid jealousy of the former valedictorian, who now is known to spend hours after school in the library cramming.

Kurusu never spends time in the library. Kurusu spends as little time at school as humanly possible, and once the bell rings he’s out of there, come hell or high water.

As the spring turns towards summer Kurusu gets jumpy; his resting bitch face never changes, but his foot taps sometimes during class, and occasionally someone will catch him whittling his pencils down into something sharp and deadly, or fiddling under his desk with paperclips and string. He looks out the door more often, is out of class first and soonest; once he just leaves class in the middle of a lecture, and Kashiwagi is too stunned to call him back.

The weirdest thing about the new Kurusu, though, is the out-of-towners.

No one knows how many of them there are; they come in a big old beat-up van at any given holiday. For Golden Week there were only three; during the summer there are six.

The first time anyone sees them is the first time they see Kurusu emote since his return— there’s a slim brunette and a bombshell blonde waiting by the school gates, and those lucky few who were there say that Kurusu actually dropped his school bag in shock, right before he was tackled clean off his feet by another blond and sent tumbling across the grass.

Kurusu’s laugh is unexpectedly lovely, for someone who never uses it. Kurusu’s smile is the same. Kurusu with dirt on his palms and grass in his hair,  looking happy like it’s going out of style? That Kurusu is a heartbreaker, and sets several girls from every year scheming. They’re all in for disappointment; any letter that goes into Kurusu’s shoe locker never sees the light of day. He doesn’t even  _touch_ them.

During the summer no one sees Kurusu for a month or more; he disappears right out of the school yard, though one third-year says that she saw him getting into the van with several other people their age, and then popping out of a hole in the roof and yelling, arms up, as they peeled out of town. It’s an audacious claim, but she has blurry picture evidence. He shows up again at the very end of the summer, and this time the out-of-towners are all with him— several ladies, lovely in yukata of every pattern and color, a tall thin boy also in a yukata, and the blond that tackled Kurusu across the grass that one time.

Those who see him say Kurusu looks more alive than he has since he came back, suffused with vitality— they say he wins every carnival game he tries his hand at, offloading plushes onto each of the girls with him in turn, that he poses in front of the shrine for the boy in the yukata to sketch him, that he roams through the stalls and up the hill to the observatory hand-in-hand with the blond boy looking utterly at peace.

Fall begins; several official-looking cars park in front of the Kurusu household, one of them containing up-and-coming politician Yoshida-san, who’s come to Inaba to tout his platform. To everyone’s surprise, Kurusu is his assistant at the schoolwide assembly Yasogami High holds for Yoshida-san, standing up on stage like it doesn’t bother him, his neutral face giving away nothing.

But Yoshida-san speaks to him warmly, and Kurusu speaks back just as warmly— they’ve met before, clearly, and when someone in the audience asks Yoshida-san just laughs and says that Kurusu helped him quite a bit during his year in Tokyo.

Helped Yoshida-san?? With  _what?!_

The further the fall progresses, however, the weirder Kurusu gets. In gym they do a couple lessons of self-defense; the guy partnered with Kurusu can’t so much as lay a finger on him. Kurusu moves like he’s water, like he’s dancing, like he’s weightless; when his partner gets frustrated and charges at him yelling, Kurusu barks a laugh and  _backflips away_ , parkour-ing around the gym like a goddamn bouncy ball. He ends up on top of the basketball hoop somehow, his feet planted on the rim as he sits square on the backboard, and the smile on his face as he looks down on all of them is a wild, godless slash across his mouth.

The day they learn how to disarm is the day things go south; Kurusu gets the rubber knife away from his opponent with laughable ease and turns to walk away. The teacher is out of the room for a moment, talking to Kashiwagi about something or other, which is probably why the embarrassed opponent makes a move.

He rushes Kurusu from behind, and Kurusu flips the knife in his hand and stabs backward in a single, vicious strike. He impacts the guy square in the solar plexus, sending him sprawling, gasping for breath; the entire gym goes silent, aside from his breaths.

Kurusu spins the knife across his fingers and spins on his heel, taking in the onlookers; he raises his hands as if to say “any other takers?”

There are. There have been a lot of tensions since Kurusu started dominating the room, a lot of people who don’t like the change in the pecking order. Those people step forward; anyone who doesn’t want a hand flees to the edges. No one goes to get the teacher or Kashiwagi, not until Kurusu has a pile of bodies at his feet and his hand in a boy’s hair, dragging his head back, the rubber knife pressed to his throat.

He’s not even breathing hard.

He’s suspended for three days.

The group of defeated boys get their chance for some petty revenge in late november; Kurusu’d had something delivered to the office, and comes back with a box of cupcakes that he doesn’t so much as pretend like he’s going to share; no, the bastard sits there and eats them one by one in front of everyone. They look goddamn delicious, and expensive— they’ve got the logo of a famous Tokyo bakery on them, it must have cost tons to get them shipped fresh to Inaba.

They’re doing timed races in gym that day, and the gym teacher lets everyone get a chance to fire the starting gun. When he’s out of the room, someone hollers “Hey, Kurusu!”

When Kurusu looks over, seemingly on autopilot, they point it directly at him and fire.

Kurusu…bluescreens.

That’s it— he just stands there, hands clenched, eyes empty. His breath picks up; tremors rack up and down his body, seemingly without his notice. It’s really fucking creepy, and he doesn’t respond even when the one who fired tries to brush it off as a joke.

He only really responds when someone— one of the girls— comes up and pats his shoulder to ask if he’s okay.

He flinches violently away from her touch, staggers back, and barely makes it to a trashcan before he pukes.

He’s not in class for the rest of the day. He’s not in class the day after, either. The day after that, a light-haired, dark-eyed defense attorney visits the school to talk to both the principal and the boy who fired the racing gun. The boy who fired the gun is given a three-day suspension, and the rest of the gym class is treated to an impromptu lesson on PTSD, and why you don’t fire a gun at a person who you don’t want to kill.

Which, for the savvier third years, raises a question— who pointed a gun at Kurusu?  _Who tried to kill Kurusu?!_

Kurusu comes back after a few days, but he’s pale and wan, and makes absolutely no attempt to pay attention in class. He’s on his phone constantly, to the point where he often carries it around attached to a portable charger to bolster the battery; the teachers allow it, if only because his grades are still top of the class and he does it silently. He’s probably the least-disruptive person in class at this point. No one has heard him talk since the incident.

Two days before the winter holidays, the blond is back outside the school gates. There’s no tackling this time; Kurusu’s cat jumps out of his bag, and Kurusu just walks forward into the blond’s arms, clinging back tight enough that his knuckles are white.

They don’t move; his classmates walk by rubbernecking in clumps, but it doesn’t look like either of them notice. Kurusu’s face is buried in the blond boy’s neck, and the blond rubs his hand up and down Kurusu’s back like he’s soothing him. Kurusu’s cat winds around both their ankles, talking in its weird purry chirps.

A few of the stealthier second-years decide to trail them from a distance; the blond wraps an arm around Kurusu’s shoulder and walks him right to the train station. They don’t stop by his house or anything; Kurusu gets on in his school uniform and everything and vanishes.

He doesn’t come to class for the rest of the semester.

No one sees him over the winter break.

He’s not in class on the first day after break, either, and eventually word comes down from on high that Kurusu Akira has transferred out of Yasogami High back to his prestigious Tokyo school.

There’s a weird mood through the third-years after that. No one knows if it’s because of the guy who fired the gun— not even the guy himself, who carries some vague aura of guilt for the rest of the semester. Nobody misses him— well, nobody misses him for who he was. He wasn’t a very friendly boy, after all. Who knows how he got all of those weird out-of-towners to follow him around?

No, the only thing Kurusu Akira is missed for is the breath of fresh air he brought to Inaba when he came back, the sheer mystery of his presence. After a few weeks, few even speak his name.


End file.
